Amazon Web Services unveils new cloud caching service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new managed caching service for the cloud called Elasticache aimed at businesses and developers who want to support high performance web applications in the cloud.

Using the widely adopted Memcached standard, ElastiCache is a new web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache for web applications running in the AWS cloud.

The new service improves the performance of web applications by enabling customers to retrieve information from a fast, managed, in-memory caching system in the cloud, instead of relying on slower disk-based databases.

Amazon ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing Memcached environments work seamlessly with the service, easing the migration process.

The service also simplifies and offloads the management, monitoring and operation of in-memory cache environments, enabling businesses to focus their engineering resources on the differentiating parts of their applications.

ElastiCache is aimed at social media, gaming and media sharing sites

Amazon says ElastiCache is ideal for read-heavy workloads such as social networking, gaming and media sharing sites or compute intensive workloads such as recommendation engines.

“Caching is a core part of so many web applications today, but running your own caching infrastructure is time-consuming and rarely adds differentiated value for your business,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services.

“Until today, businesses have had little choice but to shoulder this responsibility themselves — and indeed, many AWS customers have built and managed caching solutions on top of AWS for some time. Amazon ElastiCache answers one of the most highly requested functionalities of AWS customers by providing a managed, flexible and resilient caching service in the cloud.”